30 June 2007

Wow... it's been over a month since we were in Madrid and still no trip report. Shame on me. Well, now I'm getting my act together. Really, I am.

The trip report will be kind of "haphazard" like the Western Cape trip report, i.e. grouped by random events and stuff like food, not day-by-day. We were there from the 15th of May (arrived late afternoon) to the 20th of May, in case you want to know.

Since the photos are on another machine, I'll start this trip report by discussing the visit to the Prado Museum, where we weren't allowed to take photos...

We went to the Prado Museum on the 17th of May, right after having some Cava in our hotel room after breakfast, to celebrate the fact it was the 17th of May (Constitution Day in Norway)...

Anyway, Prado is one of the most famous art museums in the world. It is a large museum with lots of exhibits, but I noticed that many of the paintings have a religious (Christianity) theme - Jesus or the Virgin Mary or something or other from the Bible. One of the more bizarre of these was Alonso Cano's San Bernardo y la Virgen (The Vision of St. Bernard). It was a painting where the "virgin" was squirting breastmilk into some guy's mouth. So all that kooky fetish stuff you find on the Net these days... nothing new. Another weird one was Juan Martin Cabezalero's La Asunción de la Virgen (Assumption of the Virgin). Among the weird things on the painting, freaky floating babies' heads, some with wings. WTF? I doodled bits of that painting in my Moleskine. I should scan it and show it to you all. It's a rather amusing interpretation... :-P

There also were lots of interesting works by Goya as well; we actually bypassed a lot of exhibits in order to have the energy to look at the Goya exhibit. The most fascinating was Saturno (Saturn devouring one of his children), where some kind of "wolfman" was eating a guy; his head was already devoured. I wonder what inspired that...

Throughout the museum, there were artists scattered here and there, with their easels set up, painting detailed versions of select parts of a painting on exhibit, not the whole painting. It was interesting to watch them work. They seemed rather oblivious to all the tourists watching them...

There were also a lot of groups of schoolchildren throughout the museum. When they were walking past, they would make a sort of train, where the kid behind grabbed the shirt of the kid in front. Very cute...

Overall, a museum well worth a visit. You'll need around 3 hours there, give or take depending on what you actually want to see. Be sure to research what exhibits are actually there before you go and find out what you want to see, if you're on a time crunch. I think some people could spend a whole day there...

04 June 2007

I found this interesting article in the BBC the other day and thought I'd write a little about it. It's both exciting and sad. Exciting in that there is a relatively "untouched" destination out there, a destination that promises fantastic wildlife. Sad due to the conflict in bordering countries, and due to the poaching resulting from the demand for ivory. And that part about using giraffes' tails to make bracelets brought tears to my eyes...

I like the idea of making the villagers tourists in their own area, as well as making them a part of the tourism industry. It helps them respect their wildlife, respect what Chad has to offer to others, and better enable them to show tourists that Chad really isn't such a bad place. Despite a bumpy 11-hour ride to get there ;-)